Year: 2006

Quoting from CNet News:

…
One performance problem comes because operating systems are accustomed to handling a part of the chip called the translation lookaside buffer, or TLB, which converts an operating system’s relative memory addresses into the actual addresses used by the hardware. But with a hypervisor actually in charge of memory, virtualization adds a second level of translation to the task.

To deal with the situation, hypervisors use software called shadow paging. “It’s complex to implement and can be fairly slow,” Sander said. Barcelona technologies, including “nested page tables” and the caching of memory addresses, speeds up the memory issue.
…
In addition, Barcelona has new instructions that shorten the chip’s “world switch time,” when it switches from guest operating system mode to hypervisor mode and back. Such a switch typically takes about 1,000 to 2,000 processor cycles, but the new instructions shorten that by about 25 percent, Sander said.
…
In addition, he said Barcelona has dual memory controllers to read and write data from memory. That’s the same number as current Opterons, but with Barcelona, the memory controllers will be able to operate independently, he said…

Read the whole article at source.

Update: ExtremeTech has published an extended description of the new processor architecture. Worth to check it.

Quoting from the IDC official announcement:

The worldwide virtual machine software (VMS) market grew to $560 million in 2005, a robust 67% growth over the previous year and topping the 63% year-over-year growth recorded in 2004.
…
EMC/VMware was the top VMS vendor in 2005, with a market share of over 55%.
…
Other highlights from the VMS market in 2005 include the following:

• Linux experienced the fastest growth
• Industry-standard (x86-based) systems lead the market for VMS software
• North American organizations purchased over half of all VMS products
• New use cases for the technology emerged

virtualization.info reflected this huge growth rate in its statistics at the end of the year.

The new virtualization startup Veeam, already raising customers interest for its Monitor solution, launched today another tool: FastSCP for VMware ESX Server.

The solution offered completely free of charge aims to simplify file transferts to/from ESX Server, with a more secure and more flexible way than FTP.

FastSCP is a GUI application for Microsoft Windows which works with ESX Server existing daemons, SSH and FTP, remapping remote resources in a Explorer-like interface:

Download it here.

As soon as the VMware offering becomes oriented for large deployments, new challenges hit its customers.
One of them surely is security maintainance, with a particular attention to patch management.

So here the latest technical note from the company about the esxupdate tool:

The process of applying software updates to an ESX Server system has become complex and time-consuming. Each new update introduces changes into the existing system, and it is crucial to apply only the required updates in order to stay current with security fixes and minimize the changes to your software environment while doing so.

Release 3.0 of the ESX Server system introduces a new software update model to address the challenges outlined above. This update model facilitates selective application of software updates specific to a particular environment. It also provides the flexibility of staying current with security and critical updates and allowing non-critical updates to be applied at a later time…

Read the whole paper at source.

vizioncore published a nice guide to use VMware ESX Server with a NFS remote storage hosted on Microsoft Windows.

Read it here.

While this method provides a very low cost solution for ESX Server testing environments, it still implies the availability of a Windows license.
To cut away this cost as well I strongly recommend considering 2 open source projects:

• OpenFiler (supporting CIFS/NFS/iSCSI)
• FreeNAS (supporting CIFS/NFS)

Both allow to create a fully working network storage from bare metal, and without the hassle of configuring a complete Linux distribution.

Quoting from the Egenera official announcement:

Egenera, Inc., a leader in datacenter virtualization architecture, today announced it has joined the VMware Community Source program. This will enable Egenera to port VMware ESX Server?part of VMware Infrastructure?to the Egenera BladeFrame system, complementing Egenera’s virtualized computing architecture with the server virtualization capabilities of VMware ESX Server and giving customers flexibility in hypervisor technology options…

This is a very interesting announcement which will open new and unexpected possibilities for VMware high-end customers. Worth to observe evolution of the deal.

Quoting from the SANRAD official announcement:

SANRAD Incorporated, a leading supplier of open enterprise IP SANs, today announced its product portfolio of IP SAN solutions fully supports VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. SANRAD?s support for VMware enables VMware customers to utilize their existing IP network and storage resources to consolidate storage management and data recovery.
…
SANRAD?s GDR supports VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 delivering business continuity and enabling customers to replicate data to a remote site for disaster recovery. All storage services for VMware are delivered and managed from SANRAD?s consolidated IP SAN solution using a single graphical user interface…

The IBM RedBook department published a new paper about the virtualization capabilities offered by System p5 servers:

This IBM Redpaper provides best practices for planning, installing, maintaining, and operating the functions available using the Advanced POWER Virtualization feature on IBM System p5 servers.
…
This paper begins where Advanced POWER Virtualization on IBM System p5, SG24-7940, ends by adding additional samples and scenarios harvested by a select team that works at client and outsourcing sites, running both small and large installations. The experiences contained within are select best practices from real-life experience.

A working understanding of the Advanced POWER Virtualization feature and logical partitioning and IBM AIX 5L is required, as well as a basic understanding of network and VLAN tagging…

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Administration, backup, and restore
• Chapter 3 – Networking
• Chapter 4 – Storage
• Chapter 5 – Performance and planning

Read the whole paper at source.

One of the most expected solution at upcoming VMworld 2006 is VMmark: a reliable benchmarking system to measure virtual machines performances.

After gradually introducing the benchmarks topic during these months, VMware finally reveals some details about this system with a new 14-pages whitepaper:

…
Clearly, a more sophisticated approach is required to quantify a virtualization environment’s performance and ability to run an increasing number of diverse virtual machines as physical resources increase.

First, all relevant hardware subsystems should be exercised as they would in an actual datacenter. The individual virtual machines should also operate at less than full utilization to mimic consolidation within a datacenter environment. The benchmark must scale in a controlled fashion to make comparisons between systems meaningful. Small fluctuations in the performance of individual virtual machines can be used to discern minor differences between similar systems. Larger gaps in performance can be measured by increasing the number of active virtual machines. The benchmark must also exhibit stable, reproducible performance.

This paper presents a benchmark, VMmark, to address these goals. The paper is structured as follows:

• Workload Tiling on page 2 introduces the concept of a multi-workload tile that encapsulates several diverse workloads.
• Workloads on page 3 describes the individual workloads
• The scoring algorithm is presented in Scoring Methodology on page 6
• Scores from a 2-CPU server are presented in Experimental Results on page 7

…

Read the whole paper at source.

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